Fredrik Ekman is a middle school language teacher living in Sweden. He has previously worked as a free-lance journalist, specializing in computers and information technology. Fredrik’s interest in constructed languages is mainly focused on artistic conlangs, and on conlangs as a tool for teaching and learning. He has also written about Edgar Rice Burroughs, and has been called “a premier Swedish ERB collector and scholar”. He is a contributing member of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Amateur Press Association (ERB-APA), and he often writes in that forum about the languages invented by Burroughs.

During the past three decades, several languages have been created for movies and tv series. One of the most well-known is Klingon (Star Trek). As of March 2012, the latest example is Barsoomian, created by Paul Frommer (well-known for designing the Na’vi language spoken in Avatar) for the movie John Carter. The movie is adapted from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 novel A Princess of Mars, and the language is based on the Martian words found in that novel and its ten sequels. In this interview, one of his first about this new language, Frommer talks about the background and process of developing the language, as well as some of its linguistic features.